Poem at 30,000 Feet

I'd forgotten about this until this evening, so I decided to polish it up and post it. I wrote this on my Dallas to Chicago flight back in March. I think I was trying to capture in words why exactly I love flying so much. Anyway, here it is.

Poem at 30,000 Feet

flying on a cloudy day
rising in an airplane up and away from the anchor
of land
rising through dense, damp white before

seeing the sun

feeling its heat knowing
that people miles below shiver
under lowering gray

watching the sun revealed
through a veil of water vapor

light spills upon the floor of clouds
reflected white as on the surface
of a still, morning lake

your craft rocked roughly by the fists
of the fussing wind currents

above, the blue that fades to black
where the imagination dusts in stars

below, rolling hills, peaked ridges,
smooth plains all white and soft gray,
the landscape of the sky
and somewhere beneath this new ground
falls snow.
a second blanket covering
the distant memory
of the frozen earth.

I'm Not Internationally Known...Oh, wait. Yeah, I am.

A few days ago, I was quietly reading my novel in the teachers' room at work (My job's real demanding), ignoring the buzz of Japanese conversations around me when my ears suddenly perked up at one word: "supein-go." For you non-Japanese-knowers out there, this word literally means "Spain language," i.e. Spanish. I made the movement that my co-ALT Steven has dubbed "the Golden Retriever," that little upward jerk of the face, eyes wide with complete attention, that is an involuntary reaction to a familiar word heard in the midst of a stream of unfamiliar ones.

Steven, sitting next to me, noticed my sudden movement and looked up too, asking me what had drawn my interest. When I told him, he turned his attention to the conversation (unlike me, he actually knows Japanese), listened for a moment and then, looking even more interested, joined in. I heard him tell the teachers, "Sara also speaks Spanish," so I gave the half-crazed, smiling nod that I can't help doing on the rare occasions that I actually understand something someone has said in Japanese. "Sugoiiiiii!" said the other teachers. (This word is something akin to the English word, "Wow.")

Steven turned to me then and explained that the teachers had been discussing a new student whose parents were Spanish-speakers. It was necessary to send home some forms, but the parents didn't read Japanese, so they were trying to figure out how to communicate the necessary information to them.

"Sara could translate the documents into Spanish," Steven told our colleagues. "Of course, she doesn't read Japanese either..." : (

"But you do, Steven," the teachers replied eagerly.

And so it was decided that Steven would translate the documents into English for me, and I would then translate them into Spanish for the parents. Then, if any reply was made, the whole process would be repeated in reverse. A few minutes later, after we had all returned to our previous activities (or lack thereof), Steven leaned over to me and murmured, "I can't help but feel that this whole thing is like a game of Chinese whispers for the insane." Chinese whispers is what the Brits call the game Telephone. Oh, those Brits and their quaint names for things.

Yesterday morning, we were presented with the documents in question -- one sports club participation form and two letters concerning school lunch payments (thrilling stuff). So we got down to business, Steven making short work of the Japanese to English leg of the journey, and me laboriously transforming the resulting English artifacts into some semblance of comprehensible Spanish. Steven offered the occasional helpful suggestion, such as that I should call the school principal the "tribal chieftain" and refer to monthly school lunch payments as "sacrificial offerings made at the new moon." Eventually (after having to look up an embarrassing number of words), I was able to present the completed documents to the relevant teacher (She threw on some more of what Jerry refers to as "the Sugoi sauce.")

Every time I've seen that particular teacher since then, she has bowed deeply to me and thanked me profusely for my help. The look on her face warms the cockles of my heart. Golly gee, I love learning foreign languages.

Wherein I Wax Philosophical

I've been thinking about Gregor a lot lately. For those who don't know (or don't remember), Gregor was my philosophy teacher when I studied abroad in Uruguay. He was a German transplant, but spoke fluent, if accented, Spanish. He wore a leather vest and mud-splattered leather pants, rode a motorcycle, and had the most amazingly spider-like salt-and-pepper eyebrows. For more than two hours at a time, my classmates and I would find ourselves staring glazed-eyed at this man while he spoke rapidly and idiomatically on the subject of Latin American philosophy. I often found myself both overwhelmed and exhausted at the end of these classes, but I won't deny I learned a little something.

Gregor was certainly the first person to introduce me to some basic philosophical concepts, and in fact, to this day, there are some topics I feel more comfortable explaining in Spanish than in English. Gregor's words often come back to me when I find myself confronted with an intercultural situation. I hear his voice saying in my head "Se saca del si mismo," and I see him gesturing broadly, one hand clutching the space over his heart and then wrenching away sharply, a vivid illustration of the words he is saying. "Se saca del si mismo" -- It takes him out of himself.

He's telling the story of a reporter who is one day cheerfully trotting the streets of Montevideo when his motion is arrested by a vision: he catches sight of a large dumpster, its lid just opening, and from the dumpster emerge two small hands, tossing out a piece of cardboard. A moment later a tousled mop of hair and two round eyes appear in the dumpster opening, staring at him just as he is staring at them. For a moment, as the two exchange this gaze, the reporter feels that he is the filthy child digging in the dumpster and being quizzed by the well-dressed man out on the street. For a moment, he feels what it might be like to be a different person. The experience takes him out of himself. Se saca del si mismo.

What the reporter comes to a realization of in that moment is the very concept that Gregor is trying to explain to us: the subjectivity of the other. The self remains self-contained, imagining itself the world's only subject, the main character of the play while all others remain supporting characters. The self only understands its own subjectivity and views all other beings as objects, for study, for acting upon, for interaction with, but never subjects in their own right. Until a moment like the one this reporter had when we come into contact with another existence so different from our own that we are drawn out of ourselves and made to wonder What must be happening in that other person's head?

Once that question is asked, it becomes possible for the self to imagine itself in the place of the other. The self imagines the other's point of view, in which the roles are reversed. We suddenly realize that to everyone else we ourselves are the other. Outside of ourselves, we are merely objects for a world full of other subjects. It is a fearful, a humbling thought.

Living in another culture can feel like a sustained out-of-body experience. Every moment of every day is a potential "se saca del si mismo" moment. The self, removed from its native context, comes to know itself continually as other. The self's subjectivity is continually questioned, repressed and denied. To survive intercultural living, one must learn to accept the position of object. Whether this means being the object of giggling stares or the object of well-meaning, if rudely phrased, questions, or the object of neighborhood gossip (when you inevitably put the wrong trash out in the wrong bag on the wrong day), living outside one's own culture means learning never to take your self too seriously. Which is maybe why Gregor wore those awesome eyebrows with such non-chalance...

Mini-Update: Cell Phone!

So, even though getting a cell phone in the U.S. isn't exactly blog-worthy, for some reason getting a cell phone here makes me feel really accomplished. Also, it's a pretty neat phone, by U.S. standards. Keep in mind that this was the phone that came free with the plan here...






And look! It came with free stuff: a cute little hand towel that I've already used at school (They don't have paper towels in the bathroom for drying your hands) and a free (yes, FREE) mini-SD card to use with the phone:



And I'm sure you've noticed by now that it has photo capability. Count 'em: 8 megapixels, baby. For comparison, here's a photo taken with my 5.1 megapixel digital camera and a similar photo taken with the phone:



I like.

Mini-Update: The Mask

So, I've gotten a request for an explanation about the masks. I was surprised when I first got here by how prevalent the mask-wearing is. On any given day probably a good tenth of the people you see will be masked. You might think that this is because they are afraid of the dirty infection abroad in the air. You would be half right. The people here are generally pretty nervous about germs. They try to keep things as clean as possible.

However, they also are pretty judgmental of laziness. Even if you're feeling ill, as long as you're capable of walking, you're expected to be up and about and getting things done. How to reconcile these two things? Enter the face mask!

See, people are wearing face masks not to protect themselves from illness but to protect OTHER people from their own germs. If you wake up with a cough, you're supposed to slip on a face mask to shield the world from you disgusting disease. It's probably no better or worse than our habit of covering our coughs with our elbows, though it certainly lends a certain jaunty air to the ill that you just don't get in ye old U.S. of A.